Unsullied
by Eos Blaze 0402
Summary: He's Damon Salvatore. He's smoke and mirrors and diamonds and dreams seen in the darkest of nights. He's seducer and deserter and philanderer and heartbreaker. He's not supposed to be human and lonely. He's not supposed to wish for love and dreams...


**Unsullied**

He's tiered and old, and these parties—they all seem the same to him.

He hides behind a marble column on the first floor and observes the fools who think an invitation to his home is perhaps the most important evidence of their importance.

They all look the same.

Glitzy and ordinary.

In few minutes, it will be time to put on his social persona and venture downstairs among the sheep so that for bare few moments, his loneliness leaves him alone to do as he wishes.

It has been years, and yet he still doesn't understand why he tries to lessen the silence around himself. He should give up.

But he's Damon Salvatore and he's not supposed to give up.

He's supposed to smirk and charm, to cut a man in few chosen words to remind him of his social standing. He's not supposed to feel.

The persona he donned all those years ago to save himself from the scavengers of the highest social circles after his family's demise has become his prison in more ways than one.

He's Damon Salvatore. He's smoke and mirrors and diamonds and dreams seen in the darkest of nights. He's seducer and deserter and philanderer and heartbreaker.

He's not supposed to be human and lonely.

He's not supposed to wish for love and dreams.

* * *

His eyes are drawn to her almost from the very beginning, from the moment he walks leisurely down his staircase.

She's not the most glamorous and the chandeliers—they show him more shadows than he wants to see on her face. The rubies glitter at her throat and her dark blue dress fits her like skin. There is something familiar in the way she stands, the way she tilts her head and laughs at something her companion whispers in her ears.

He entertains the fools. Charms the ladies and reduces men into a collective pool of inferiority and envy, but all the while he's doing it, his eyes—they stay on the brunette who walks hand in hand with the man whom he calls friend sometimes.

Finally, when he almost completes a round of his ballroom, he comes face to face with her.

He knows her.

The recognition is a punch to the gut.

Elena, the girl he left crying beneath a gazebo. The girl he thinks about sometimes in the nights, in the privacy of his bedroom. The girl…he might have loved.

He makes his way to where she stands with Alaric, hand in the crook of his arm and body so close to his that it looks obscene.

The ruby winks at the fourth finger of her left hand and he…he just stares at that ring, unsure about how to proceed.

Alaric makes introductions and he, like an automaton, performs correctly without a social faux pas, without giving away that he knows her, that he knows how she smells, how she tastes, how she feels in his arms.

She is aloof and cruel, and she sets his heart on fire when she utters his name in her dulcet tone.

She treats him like he is some stranger and he wants to shake her and ask her whether or not she remembers the feel of him inside her cunt, his mouth on her plump breasts.

He is Damon Salvatore, less man more persona, and it would be a sacrilege if desire were to be noticed in his eyes and the tilt of his mouth, but he, the poor fool can't stop himself.

He asks her for a dance.

* * *

They move on the strain of violin and weepy notes of a cello, on the tune clever fingers play on the piano keys. Eyes watch their entwined forms in rapture and envy.

She doesn't protest when he pulls her a bit too close, when his fingers clutch hers tightly. Desperation is a new emotion that he tastes on his tongue and it leaves him bitter and angry.

She is pretty, and warm and so damn perfect and he is cold and lonely.

He wants her.

Like a child wants the comfort of his mother's embrace, like a lover yearns for a lover's kiss.

He wants her.

Like dream and virtue that have always been denied to him, like the salvation he's never before lusted after.

Maybe, he left her crying that day years ago because he knew that she would wilt in his world of gold and lies and masks and pretenses.

Or maybe, he was just stupid and years of miserable silence have taught him the true value of companionship.

The song comes to an end too soon. Alaric taps on his shoulder to cut in. His eyes are pinched and mouth set in a frown.

Maybe, Alaric knows.

The thought dies soon in his head when Alaric pulls her close to his body and they start swaying on a slow, jazzy ballad.

She looks at Alaric with stars in her eyes and he seethes inside. His fingers curl in his palm and he wants to break something. Most preferably Alaric.

He watches them dance, watches her as she lays her head on Alaric's chest and looks him straight in the eye as if she's saying, you could've had this.

She's vindictive and hurtful and he's never loved her more than he loves her in this moment. She'll survive in his world of comic tragedies. If he teaches her right, she'll wear the mask far better than he does.

* * *

In months that follow, he throws parties every day of every week.

She's always there without fail, with Alaric by her side. Alaric who looks less happy, whose eyes shimmer with anger when they meet his for scant few moments.

He makes sure to dance with her when his musicians play ballads and waltzes. He never utters a single word of apology, but maybe she reads it in the way he softly holds her hand sometimes before gripping it too hard.

He's never been a man of words anyways.

* * *

On the eve of anniversary of his family's death, he gets drunk and walks to the cemetery with three white roses.

The marble tombstones are cold, just like he is inside.

When his parents died, when Stefan died, he swallows convulsively while he rubs his eyes, he had been so young. Seventeen years of age and unaware that world loved nothing more than a tragedy.

The years are all blurred in his head.

People stop talking about your grief if you give them something outrageous to comment on. He knows it by heart now. His grief had been too private years ago and it still is.

But now, it aches a bit less, and he doesn't actually vomit when someone asks him why his father had been found dead in a hotel room, naked, gagged, wearing a dog collar and tied to the bed. Now, he can successfully divert if a well meaning acquaintance questions if his mother killed her brother and committed suicide out of shame.

He ignores the footsteps that come from behind, choosing to kneel in front of the stones that stand guard over the resting place of people who were selfish enough to leave him here.

Alone.

A hand gently taps his shoulder and he feels like crying.

What's she doing here?

Has she come to remind him of emptiness that waits for him at home?

But she doesn't say a word, just stand at his shoulder, her fingers carding through his hair. A tear makes its way out of the corner of his eye, another follows.

He hides his face in her skirt and he weeps.

She doesn't say a word, but her fingers, they don't stop.

* * *

In the end, it's the nights that force his hand.

Nights when he lies like a stone on his large bed, aware of the space that scares him.

He counts from one to thousand and from thousand to one.

He counts the carved rosettes on his ceiling.

He starts counting the threads of his sheets.

When the morning comes, he's counting the number of times her eyes met his during the course of his life.

He's still awake.

He's still counting.

In the retrospect, he might have had a chat with Alaric and tried to make him understand why it is so important for him to be with Elena. Maybe, Alaric would've understood.

But he is too far gone, too crazed up about everything that has to do with Elena.

In the end, it is a flash of steel and smell of rust as the claret stains his hands and his clothes, as it runs on his floor from various wounds he's inflicted on Alaric's person.

Strangely, he is not upset or shaken. Instead he feels glad that it's over, that now no one will tap on his shoulder after one dance to take Elena away.

He disposes off the body, buries his once sometime friend in an unmarked grave where no one will ever come across him.

It's the least he can do for the man who graciously died so that Elena could be his.

* * *

A year from the day he laid eyes on her again, it's the same ballroom, the same foolish crowd.

The women sigh at the sight of a square cut sapphire on Elena's finger and the red dress that he chose personally for her. It's an off shoulder thing that highlights her dainty bones and smooth skin, the rise of her breasts and the choker of diamonds around her slender neck.

He pulls her in his arms when the melody they first danced to starts. The crowd falls into a hush.

He puts one hand on her waist and another finds her hand. She puts her one free hand on his shoulder and they start to move. The music is subdued passion and an ode to heartbreak. Her hands move at the back of his neck, his do too. The cellos and violins weep, for now they play the mournful tune of parting, but he…he smiles.

This is his favorite part, the pause of strings filled by the gentle notes of the piano.

He's Damon Salvatore, so the crowd doesn't gasp, but everyone remembers that when this song played a year ago, the new Mrs. Salvatore was already a married woman.

No one knows where her ex-husband disappeared off to.

Some think she killed him, but they refrain from voicing their suspicions. They have seen how enamored Damon Salvatore is with his bride.

No one misses the significance of the song choice.

He's Damon Salvatore and even his silence seems to convey that no one and nothing stands in the way of something he wants.

He has eyes only for her, and she…she smiles that enigmatic, all knowing smile.

When they stop, she leans in to whisper in his ears.

I know, she says.

He kisses her, a sweet peck on her lips.

I know that you know, he whispers, only for her ears.

The ballad starts, one that she danced with Alaric a year ago.

He looks in her eyes, she returns his stare.

Her love is his sanity and his love…well, his is the kind of love that knows how to take lives for her rather than give his up…

* * *

 **Well, I don't know what this is…**


End file.
